“I think, Tyson,” said he, “if I want to catch that early train to-morrow, I’d better take my things over to ‘The Cross-Roads’ to-night.”

“Just as you like.”

So Stanistreet betook himself to “The Cross-Roads.”

CHAPTER IX

AN UNNATURAL MOTHER

Next morning a rumor set out from three distinct centers, Thorneytoft, Meriden, and “The Cross-Roads,” to the effect that Tyson had quarreled seriously with Stanistreet.  His wife, as might be imagined, was the cause.  After a hot dispute, in which her name had been rather freely bandied about, it seems that Tyson had picked the Captain up by the scruff of the neck and tumbled him out of the house.

By the evening the scandal was blazing like a fire.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson was undoubtedly a benefactor to her small public.  She had roused the intelligence of Drayton Parva as it had never been roused before.  Conjecture followed furtively on her footsteps, and inference met her and stared her in the face.  No circumstance, not even Sir Peter’s innocent admiration, was too trivial to furnish a link in the chain of evidence against her.  Not that a breath of slander touched Sir Peter.  He, poor old soul, was simply regarded as the victim of diabolical fascinations.

After the discomfiture of Stanistreet, Mrs. Nevill Tyson’s movements were watched with redoubled interest.  Her appearances were now strictly limited to those large confused occasions which might be considered open events—­Drayton races, church, the hunt ball, and so on.  Only the casual stranger, languishing in magnificent boredom by Miss Batchelor’s side, followed Mrs. Nevill Tyson with a kindly eye.

“Who is that pretty little woman in the pink gown?” he would ask in his innocence.

“Oh, that is Mrs. Nevill Tyson.  She is pretty,” would be the answer, jerked over Miss Batchelor’s shoulder. (That habit was growing on her.)

“And who or what is Mrs. Nevill Tyson?”

Whereupon Miss Batchelor would suddenly recover her self-possession and reply, “Not a person you would care to make an intimate friend of.”

And at this the stranger smiled or looked uncomfortable according to his nature.

Public sympathy was all with Tyson.  If ever a clever man ruined his life by a foolish marriage, that man was Tyson.  Opinions differed as to the precise extent of Mrs. Tyson’s indiscretion; but her husband was held to have saved his honor by his spirited ejection of Captain Stanistreet, and he was respected accordingly.

Meanwhile the hero of this charming fiction was unconscious of the fine figure he cut.  He was preoccupied with the unheroic fact, the ridiculous cause of a still more ridiculous quarrel.  Looking back on it, he was chiefly conscious of having made more or less of a fool of himself.